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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26056180">combinations</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/elevenRain/pseuds/elevenRain'>elevenRain</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 10:46:17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,105</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26056180</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/elevenRain/pseuds/elevenRain</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Their last struggle entailed only handfuls of things – goals, methods, purposes, enemies, friends. These times will be different.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Callum &amp; Rayla &amp; Ethari, Callum/Rayla (The Dragon Prince)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>combinations</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dewed moon-lilies sway plangent under a full-moon’s eye. The dewing is an act of the odd fog-tide that invades the meadow under the full moon. It’s pin-drop quiet; he bends down, draws a finger up a lily stem, rolls it up the bottom of the flower, so that along the way he grows, on his finger, a large, pulsing dew drop. The tidal fog is pallid white with edges lapping in a sea of violet. The dew drop is crystal clear. He stares into it, alone, his eyes now also dewed. The lily’s lower petal appears as a wagging tongue, which wagging won’t unfurl unto him any great secrets, about the place or anything else, really. There is still no sound.</p><p>He remembers. He rolls the memory around with his tongue, in his mouth, like it’s a marble. Like a big, crystal clear, dewy marble. It is so perfect, the marble, that there’s no way in, no crack for his tongue to poke into, to prise open. All he can do is roll it around, play on its surface, remember ripples but not sink into the comfort of the memory.</p><p>He is alone.</p><p>The meadow is uncharacteristically empty, except of moon-lilies and of the moon. The lilies loll away in all directions; now they actually loll <i>away</i>, like with a big swooshing noise, he imagines, so that only a single lily fills his perception. Like some enormous hand has made a pinching gesture around him and this single lily and then flicked everything else away. His world is the one moon-lily whose lower edges his finger traced and whose stem his finger drew up. This lily is the confluence of all the others, he knows, though it appears indistinguishable from the rest. His moon-lily. And above, the moon, hanging pendulous, enormous and white and full.</p><p>The lily drops away.</p><p>He’s now aware of a crushing pressure, as if he is submerged in an unfathomable volume of clear liquid. The crushing pressure is of an odd sort: passive, weightless, invisible by sight smell or sound, sensible only by touch: specifically, the touch now knocking on his eardrums.</p><p>It is an insane pressure. He has to close his eyes; he cannot bring his hands up to his ears, even as his back bends and his head approaches his knees. He feels as if all the blood vessels in his body are going to burst even as he feels his eyes are going to implode.</p><p>He has dealt with pressure imparted by another. He has felt the crush of another man’s knee on his neck, of another’s boot on his moon-lily-love’s perfumed head. The consequential crush of the actions of his ancestors, of hers, of theirs. This is a different crush. It is passive and everywhere. He feels it everywhere, but everywhere it just feels like weight: there is no flexing muscle behind this crush, no active push. His eyes closed and his eardrums assaulted but somehow feeling the thrumming rhythm of the moon, now looming dominant overhead. It seems… hungry. Droning.</p><p>It is way, way too much to take.</p><p> </p><p>He screams awake, interrupting the metronomic ticking that was, formerly, the room’s only obvious sound. It’s a clock, an Ethari original. He (Ethari) learned the secrets of counting-with-teeth, of gear ratios, at that first ball, he’ll reveal when pressed – the way Callum's five fingers meshed perfectly with Rayla's four. Only a few brilliant dreams separated that insight from the first ticking clock. In the East, all the clock needs to tick on, interminably, is an unobstructed view of the night sky. The stars, who haven’t had reason to smile on Xadia in centuries, feed its movement by their light; its slicing of time, its enumeration of the pitiful number of moments left to the living, gratifies their agelessness. The stars reach out and touch it, the clock, impel it.</p><p>But someone else sees, too, with the stars. Elsewhere, strange mechanisms lurch into motion: strange wheels driving strange pinions, turning on strange arbors.</p><p>For a moment after the awakening, the metronomic ticking is again the only sound in the room. In silent spaces between ticks they can hear time’s sharp edge coolly shearing seconds off its long rectangular channel. More ticks than they register elapse, after the scream.</p><p> </p><p>“Which… which one was it?”<br/>
“No, it was… different, this time. Nobody was there. Nobody else. I was just… alone.”</p><p> </p><p>Here’s how to make a memory.</p><p>It’s late; please come to bed. Here’s a book at your nose, a book you’re buried in, a book your extrication from which will require a practiced, four-fingered hand. The book is old, too old, and yet not old enough. To be useful, that is. The really old books are really hard to find, and you’re liable to have written quite a lot of the new ones anyway, directly or indirectly, in the time since war’s end. In that new dreamtime. So what are you looking for?</p><p>Mark your page; don’t just leave it laying there, open. Please put the book away carefully. It’s old enough to be fragile, not like you lot (for now, at least). There’s the gap it left in the bookshelf, obscured partially by the neighboring books’ caving in but still obvious enough for your quadridigital partner to spot.</p><p>You have been reading to exhaustion for a lot of nights, now. What are you looking for? Why?</p><p>Here’s your bedroom. Your home. It’s at altitude, you know, so you should really be careful stumbling around exhaustedly. There are no railings, banisters, or guards generally, although you’ve got a sort of live, walking, doting, four-fingered guard guiding you along, this time. Most times. The main issue seems to have been your rising too quickly. Even sky-creatures can lose their breath, and your induction into their ranks is still relatively recent. By Xadian timescales.</p><p>This is your bed. Like its occupying pair, it’s a mixture. The sheets and pillow cases – there are a lot of pillows, a frank decadence of pillows, a single concession, a single rebellion against the otherwise spartan austerity of the hewn-rock ceiling’d mountain fortress you call home – the bedding is wine-red with gold piping; the frame is dark gnarled grown wood, each leg capped off by a silvered finial set on a dark cyan base.</p><p>The bed hasn’t started squeaking yet, and you haven’t given it much reason to, though in time you will, and it will. You’ll still like it, though, the bed. Both of you.</p><p>You like this bed, and this room, and this home, and who you share it with. You like what you do within and without this room. Please treasure all of this, while you have it.</p><p>Here’s you, sleeping, although right now your face is really just an undulating expanse of wrinkles: a great ocean, usually placid, now marked by churning waves, expressions of concentration, of realization, of terror. Because of the dream.</p><p>Please keep your voice down. Yes, it’s ok to scream every once in a while. Yes, we understand, what you’ve been through, the both of you. But at this time of night? And this loudly? It’ll be hard to forget.</p><p>And here’s her, consoling you. You treasure her. Please continue to for as long as you’re able.</p><p>Here are the memory’s words:</p><p> </p><p>“So… do you want to tell me about it? Or do we just want to try to get back to sleep and–”<br/>
“No, no I’ll try and tell you now. This one feels… important, somehow.<br/>
“I was in the meadow. Our meadow, yes. Except it was just me, and the moon-lilies, and the moon–the moon was… enormous. And I just felt so… alone. All I could do was remember–not even remember, just… try to remember. That was it.<br/>
“And then, I think I didn’t even really get to remember before I became aware of like… a crushing feeling. Like the most crushing feeling possible. It felt like every piece of me was being separately and individually crushed, like something was lavishing attention on every tiny piece of me for the sole purpose of squashing me as evenly and completely as possible. Total squashing. The big… squash.”<br/>
“Did you get a sense of what was, like, trying to crush you?”<br/>
“No, it wasn’t… yeah, I did, I guess. It wasn’t a person, or any single like agent, or anything. It wasn’t any one thing. It was just… crushing. Like just pure crushing. With no motive, no crusher. I was definitely being crushed by something, but it seemed just… totally passive. Inert. Like not conscious, but like not conscious in the way of like a rock, not in the way of a sleeping person.<br/>
“Or I guess like the ocean.”</p><p>“But the really crazy stuff started happening after that, after the… crushing, in total pitch black. No light, no sensation. I guess I was crushed. Except this horrible sinking feeling. Like my gut was in free-fall, but like a slow fall, like through honey or something.<br/>
“And finally I could remember. I remembered everything. I remembered… everything we went through, how we met, the egg, smashing the stone, feeling scared and confused. Jumping after you, falling like a stone after you because I just… I was not going to lose anything else.”</p><p>Here, she constricts his arm tighter, the pressure snapping him out of his reverie so that his head pulls upwards and he meets her eyes, and he melts a little into the obvious concern present there, before sucking in a sharp breath, lowering his gaze and continuing:</p><p>“But what I got to thinking was… what if it didn’t work? If anything–literally anything–if any one single thing had come up differently, would none of this (quick, small, encompassing sweep with the free hand) would none of this have happened? It made my stomach, like, tie up in knots, compress.”<br/>
“The dream… it took me through each of those moments. Made me watch. If Aunt Amaya’s soldier hadn’t missed. If Ez didn’t come up. If Zym died before we hatched him; if Lujanne didn’t appear. If Soren got less hurt. If Soren got more hurt. If–”<br/>
“Callum–”<br/>
“If I had been a minute later leaving for the Spire, to find you. If he hadn’t decided to gloat. If… if my wings didn’t work. If I couldn’t figure out how to use them in time. If… if I couldn’t jump.”<br/>
“Callum, I–”<br/>
Here gesturing animatedly, having freed both runed arms–<br/>
“If we never figured out what we meant to each other. If–”<br/>
Here reaching across and planting both hands on strong shoulders, squeezing with all eight fingers–<br/>
“Callum! stop. It’s ok. I’m here. It happened. It all happened, the way it happened.”</p><p>Finally exhaling, deflating, as if punctured.</p><p>“It’s just, sometimes when I look at you I still can’t believe it, that you’re here, that we’re here, that this is… our life. And it all seems so… fragile. And before it was just that… I was scared that our life, this life, was fragile because it could be taken away. Taken away later, by something else, in the future. Like so much else of ours had been taken. Has been taken. And figuring out how to defend against that has been eating away at me ever since we got a chance to catch our breath.<br/>
“But in the dream, that sinking feeling… I guess what terrified me was how fragile it was that all of this even… happened.”</p><p>Another of those ticking silences. Nothing moves except the three ticking hearts in the room. His eyes down, hers up and to the side.</p><p>“Callum… You deserve to be loved. You are lovable. And I’m glad everyday that I get to give it to you. My love. Whatever happened, you still would’ve been a good person. Whatever happened happened because you were a good person. Are still a good person. Will always be a good person.<br/>
“The path we took here might’ve changed a bit, sure. It might’ve been an entirely different path, maybe a longer one, maybe a windier one, maybe even a better one. Maybe one with fewer boats and fewer snakes… but we would’ve wound up in the same place. I know it.<br/>
“All the paths flow to here, to this point, right now.</p><p>“I love you.”</p><p>“I love you, too. I… (exhaling, shoulders slumping: collapsing, generally) thank you.”<br/>
“Always.”<br/>
More ticking, now. Charged silence.<br/>
“So you’re the one making big speeches now, huh?”<br/>
“Learned from the best.”<br/>
Nuzzling.<br/>
“We should… probably get back to sleep, now, then.”<br/>
“Yeah. Goodnight, love.”<br/>
“Goodnight.”</p><p>Stars beyond time watch.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>My first time sharing anything!</p><p>This was mostly writing practice, but I've got a bunch of really kooky ideas kicking around the ole' noggin.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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